For those interested in nanobiology and nanoscale medicine, the site Nanomedicine and Nanobiology Research is worth exploring. The book section includes various books you’ll recognize (and quite a few you may not), there’s a nanomedicine-specific Medline search, and there are rankings for labs, researchers, and even science writers.

Most interesting to me are the “Early career scientists ranked by total citation score.” Asia is doing very well in this critical category.

In an email, founder Christian Hesketh explained how they do the rankings:

Our lab registry is comprehensive and was compiled from medline abstracts containing specific nanomedicine keyphrases (we only include laboratories with 5 or more publications). We then used our database of citation histories compiled from open source journal article reference lists and a major OCR (optical character recognition) campaign on our entire reference library. Labs are ranked according to the citation rate of each individual article. For articles where we did not have sufficient data or were too new to have citation data, we used historical citation data from the journal and the principal investigator. Our registry ranks the top 382 laboratories, with Chad Mirkin’s lab garnering the highest score. Pat Couvreur, Royce Murray, Dave Reinhoudt and Ralph Weissleder rounded out the top 5. Our intention with the registry is to help new graduate students and postdocs to find high impact laboratories. This information is probably interesting to the general public as well if they are interested in the most productive labs. Our company is called Ion Channel Media Group (http://www.ionchannelmedia.com) and we operate a large number of life science portals. I am the founder and I was trained in classical biophysics in Canada.

A useful site. Thanks, Christian, for providing this service free. —Christine